Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Mini Green Tea Crunch Bars- Asian Food Market: Cherry Hill, NJ

Mini Green Tea Crunch Bars- Asian Food Market: Cherry Hill, NJ

Remember those Vanilla Bean Kit-Kat bars I reviewed a few weeks ago? They were in the same endcap as these and I just couldn't resist. Sure, fancy flavored Kit-Kat bars are all the rage on the internet (and the foodie community), but I've never seen a flavored Crunch bar before, so I had to have it.
When compared to the Kit-Kat packaging, this bag's design is a lot less elegant. The images of freshly whisked green tea and the candy bars are really nice, but Crunch's navy blue and red logo comes across as being really obnoxious. I understand that the logo defines the brand and it's identity, but the mixture of red, navy, and matcha-green just doesn't work for me. I don't know what the company would do to fix it, other than change the red logo to white and just have it stand out from the blue background, but I don't think Crunch has ever forsaken their red logo.

Inside the bag are itty bitty candy bars that are individually wrapped and similarly designed. The individual wrapping makes these candy bars really easy to share but this packaging also produces a lot more trash.

It's been a while since I've had a mini Crunch bar here in the states, but these seem a lot smaller than I remember. Is this the average size for mini bars these days?

Unlike the Kit-Kat bars, there's no space on the back of this candy to add a little note before you give it to a friend, but these things are pretty tiny. I can't imagine you'd be able to fit much on there even if they had provided an area for writing. Out of the two items, I'd say Kit-Kat has far superior packaging design and layout, but maybe this will taste even better. Let's find out!

Once opened, I could see that the candy bar was a lovely pistachio-green color. It smells sweet, like white chocolate, but it also has a grassy matcha aroma. If any of you have had matcha before, it smells and tastes earthy and natural. I liken it to wheat grass, which doesn't sound very appetizing, but it can be a bit of an acquired taste.

I took a bite, and the white chocolate confectionery base was really sweet and milky, but there was a decent amount of green tea flavoring. This tastes just white chocolate that has been mixed up with instant matcha powder, which if you like matcha that is a very good thing, and there were plenty of puffed crisps to add some texture to this treat.

I like a lot of foreign sweets, but matcha isn't one of my favorite flavors. I prefer to drink it as a beverage and even then I like it ice cold with lemon and honey. I'm no matcha purist, so I thought this flavored candy bar was okay at best. However, my boyfriend loves matcha and green tea flavored sweets, and he absolutely loved these candy bars. (I hid a few in his bag before he left on his trip a few weeks ago.) He really liked these a lot and I would buy these again for him in the future.

This treat is interesting and I would love to see more flavored Crunch bars in the future, but unless you like matcha and grassy flavors, this specific flavor might not be your cup of tea. (Eh? See what I did there. I'm sorry.)

2 comments:

I posted these 2 years ago, so they might have been a limited edition flavor in Japan, which is fairly common. I don't see much information online about them anymore, but if I do I'll update the post to let you know.